Hydraulic fracturing (also known as “fracking”) is a natural gas and oil retrieval method that injects pressurized fracking fluids with added solid materials (typically sands or abrasive particles known as “proppants”) into a well hole to fracture sub-surface rocks to thereby release natural gas and oil from the rocks for recovery.
A common problem with hydraulic fracturing is that some of the fracking fluid remains in the well hole after the fracking process has been completed. The fracking fluid sitting in the well hole can cause the bottom end of the fracking assembly to become stuck; making it difficult to remove after the hydraulic fracturing has been completed. It would instead be desirable to remove unwanted fracking fluid with proppant from the well hole to assist in avoiding this sticking problem.
As will be shown, the present system provides a variety of approaches to removing residual fracking fluid from the well hole after the completion of the hydraulic fracturing process.